All posts by Lorelle VanFossen

Lorelle VanFossen is a trainer and consultant in WordPress, User Experience (UX), blogging, social media, and online business. She is currently teaching WordPress at Clark College in Vancouver, Washington, and other colleges, in addition to private training and various public workshops. Author of Lorelle on WordPress covering WordPress and blogging tips, help, and advice for beginners to advanced users, she is the author of numerous books and ebooks on blogging, social media, web publishing - you name it. She travels the world speaking at conferences about her passion to help people have their say online.

This year, the ClarkWP student staff will be creating a glossary of WordPress words, terminology, and jargon as part of the Clark College WordPress class in Vancouver, Washington.

Part of their class assignments will be to find a word specific to WordPress and write a post defining and clarifying the word, featuring links to resources and references to help us better understand the word and see examples in usage.

If you have a word you’d like to see added to this project, please let us know below. The word must be WordPress-specific, though we may expand into blogging terminology.

WP Tavern reported recently that WordPress Developers are organizing a community initiative to standardize common post types, taxonomies and meta data. Led by Justin Tadlock, popular WordPress developer and author of Professional WordPress Plugin Development, the goals of the community project are to name these common parts of WordPress to create a more stable and portable nomenclature for WordPress.

Multimedia Links: Instead of using embed codes or shortcodes, WordPress developers are working to permit multimedia link embeds into posts and Pages. Just get the address of the YouTube, Flickr, DailyMotion, Blip, Photobucket, SmugMug, Viddler, Vimeo, and many others and they will appear as the multimedia content. Work has been going on with this for several versions, but this is a big push to improve the system.

Media Library Grid View: Work on improving the Media Library and media management system in WordPress continues with the addition of a grid view in addition to the existing list view, and image and image information previews.

TinyMCE/Toolbar: The Toolbar for the Visual Editor in WordPress, called TinyMCE, has improvements for lists and other features, and the color picker was added back in.

While it isn’t the purpose of this site to publish political news or commentary on current events, this particular issue touched the students of the WordPress class at Clark College and they’ve asked the instructor to expand upon the discussion held in class on this topic.

The lives and welfare of bloggers and social media publishers are often restricted by local and national freedom of speech and censorship laws, labeled insurgents, protestors, and activists violating laws with the “goal of inciting riots or government overthrow.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Reporters Without Borders report frequently on the persecution, imprisonment, and attacks on bloggers and web publishers around the world, citing 27 journalists and “netizens and citizen journalists” killed and 174 journalists and 166 netizens imprisoned since the beginning of 2014 on their Press Freedom Barometer.

This past week, Russia has imposed the Internet Law, commonly known as the “blogger’s law,” imposing registration, site blocking, and harsher penalties against websites found to be inciting dissension in Russia.

Russian President Putin Puts Down Internet Freedoms

“The goal is to kill off the political blogosphere by the fall.” – blogger Andrei Malgin

A report called “World Press Freedom Index 2014 states that Russia is 148th out of 179 countries on their list rating government’s media freedom and rights, and anticipating an even lower score next year due to Putin’s “draconian legislation” and efforts to restrict freedom of speech and transparency within its borders.

With so many people embracing WordPress and incorporating it into their lives and businesses as a content management and web publishing system, the improvements the development teams worked on for this new version reflect the growing reliance on WordPress across multiple user types and needs. Continue reading WordPress 3.9 Released→

Clark College’s class isn’t a typical class. It is a class that evolves each quarter with each collection of students. Students contribute tutorial articles to the student-managed and produced online magazine, ClarkWP, used in the class notes for future student’s education. We call it legacy content.

Among the legacies left behind each quarter is a collection of tips from students completing the course to help new students learn from their mistakes and successes on how to get the most out of the I course at Clark College with Lorelle VanFossen.

Spring Quarter 2013-14

Here are the tips for future students taking the course from the Spring Quarter of 2013-14.

From Stephanie Billmyre:

Getting the opportunity to take a class like Lorelle’s WordPress (CTEC 160) is one you may not get twice, and the advantage should be seized to it’s full potential. Not only is the entire class environment absolutely amazing but, if you truly thrive for knowledge in WordPress writing, web development, css, html, social media, and marketing via the web and want to explore how to start AND MAINTAIN your very own site, then you will enjoy this class. My recommendations come from my own experiences are intended to ultimately encourage you to stick with the class until the very end!

Here is my advise:

Do not be shy in this class, it is a collaborative subject [MAKE A BUDDY]. If you do not work well in groups or on team projects then this class may not be for you.

Take only this class if your schedule will accommodate for it or take light alternatives to fill your schedule – there is a lot of work and you are expected to complete it.

Remember to keep an open mind and think outside of the box – ask for help.

Don’t blink; don’t miss ANY classes.

When you are done with class each day give your neighbor a high five; the entire group will need it after racing through the material and trying to capture the thousands of ideas coming your way as you explore all the wonderful opportunities of WordPress.

WordShesh is a virtual style WordCamp presenting WordPress topics streamed for 24 hours on December 7, 2013, from 00:00 UTC on. There will be one session every hour on the hour with international WordPress experts.

The BuddyPress team are working hard on this innovative WordPress Plugin that brings a social layer to your self-hosted WordPress site. The next release is in beta testing with BuddyPress 1.9 Beta 1 released to testers.

…becoming a top WordPress developer is hard work — very hard work. It’s going to take a lot of time, energy and determination. If you’re looking for an easy checklist or some “fast pass” to the top, you’re going to waste your time. Being one of the best is hard, and statistically speaking, the odds are stacked against you.

Welcome to the new class site for the Clark College WordPress classes.

This is your site but more than just your class site. Students will work together to add to the wealth of information on how to use WordPress as part of your homework assignments. The site will serve future Clark College WordPress students, so write and contribute well as your articles will be helping students three, five, maybe even ten years from now.Continue reading Welcome→

If you want to become an expert programmer and make a living developing software you’ll need to learn a wide range of stuff, from logic gates to how the hardware works, from algorithms to data structures and programming paradigms (if this is actually what you are looking for I suggest you peek at the curriculum of the Computer Science degree on some good university and follow along).

Welcome to the class site for the WordPress classes at Clark College in Vancouver, Washington. All content is created by the students and instructors writing about WordPress, offering WordPress tips, techniques, and helpful information as part of their class assignments. Student discussions are held on ClarkWP Talk. Please see our About, Contributors, and Policies for more information.

Students Serving Up WordPress Tips and Techniques for Clark College Students and the World

Welcome to ClarkWP Student Site

Welcome to the class site for the WordPress classes at Clark College in Vancouver, Washington. All content is created by the students and instructors writing about WordPress, offering WordPress tips, techniques, and helpful information as part of their class assignments. Student discussions are held on ClarkWP Talk. Please see our About, Contributors, and Policies for more information.

Welcome to the Clark College student-run WordPress site. This is a class project for the WordPress and related courses offering articles by the students on WordPress and web publishing news, tips, techniques, and commentary.

Many of the articles are graded class assignments, but many are self-assignments by the students.